The poem that provides the most sustained vernacular consideration of the terms and possibilities of ‘lewed’ and ‘clergie’ in late medieval England is at the same time extraordinarily circumspect about the position from which it views them. Piers Plowman gives us no definite specification of its author's or even its narrator's rank, status as clerical or lay, level and source of education, immediate or projected audience, or source of support during the writing of his poem. Nor does it offer us a clear statement of motives, methods, and objectives, or a straight-forward narrative of events. Unlike vernacular scientific, devotional, and pastoral treatises, historical writings, and even romances, the poem lacks a formal prologue of the sort that so often addresses and directs readers; lacks as well the sort of asides and interpolated notes in which writers often reveal their views more directly; and is anything but consecutively systematic in its presentation. Even when compared with the generic affiliates this book examines, extraclergial works that employ the tools and topics of clerical argument in the vernacular for polemic ends in which it is normal for writers to leave their position and education unclear, Piers Plowman's determined indeterminacy is rather extreme. The poem's narrator takes on more ‘lewed’ and more ‘clergial’ roles depending on the circumstances, and he is not even the only site of the poem's uncertainties about ‘clergie’: on some occasions he is merely an onlooker at the discussions or disputes of speakers whose positions may be at least as difficult to fix as his own, while on others he modulates into addressing readers directly – in a voice apparently authoritative, but not clearly authorial.